Let’s cast our minds back to early February. This is when Moonfall, Roland Emmerich’s latest sci-fi disaster film, was released to a near-deafening shrug of apathy from the general public. Moonfall cost almost $150m to make, but in the months since its release has only managed to recoup $67m. It is currently the 13th biggest flop in the entire history of cinema (almost certainly).
Moonfall was a film about the moon threatening to plummet out of the sky and crash into Earth. And yet, somehow, the film failed to find an audience. I am telling you this because soon there will be a film about Adam Driver accidentally going back in time and shooting a load of dinosaurs with some sort of space gun. And, by God, we must protect this film with our lives.
The film is called 65 (because dinosaurs lived on Earth until 65 million years ago) and nobody has high hopes for it; not least because many scientists now believe that dinosaurs actually became extinct 66 million years ago, so by rights this should really just be a film about Adam Driver accidentally going back in time and finding a bunch of million-year-old dinosaur corpses.
And yet the 65 trailer was released yesterday and, by God, try to stop yourself from rooting for it. The whole thing looks preposterous: the premise is hokey, the special effects look rubbish, and Adam Driver appears to be capital-A Acting with enough ferocious intensity to make Marriage Story look like Digby the Big Red Dog. But at the same time I sort of want to watch it a hundred times in a row with everyone I’ve ever met.
It helps that 65 has enormous pedigree. As well as Driver being on board, the film is being produced by Sam Raimi, has Danny Elfman as a composer and is written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods. Beck and Woods, you’ll remember, wrote A Quiet Place. But they didn’t write A Quiet Place Part II, and given how that turned out you have to assume they were the ones who made the first film good.
So maybe 65, a film where – and let’s be clear – Adam Driver from Marriage Story goes back in time and blasts a ton of dinosaurs in the face with what to all intents and purposes is a laser gun, could beat the odds and become the best film that has ever been made. The trailer certainly suggests that this might be a possibility. It bristles with so much confidence that it doesn’t even bother to hide the plot’s biggest twist. Most trailers would hide the fact that, although he thinks he is on an alien planet, Adam Driver is actually on Earth. Of course they would. That would rob the film of its surprise, gaspworthy ending. But not 65. Within the first two minutes of the trailer, some text pops up onscreen and basically says “Nah, just messing, they’re on Earth”. And you really have to admire chutzpah of that magnitude.
It also helps that Adam Driver has a companion on his quest to, I don’t know, kill all of the dinosaurs in the world. The companion is one of those wide-eyed, near-mute children that sci-fi occasionally likes to fling at us. The child here only has a few lines in the trailer, and they mostly consist of her repeating the last word of whatever Adam Driver has just said to her, which makes her sound a bit like an irreparably traumatised Beastie Boy. Anyway, she barely does anything, which gives Adam Driver lots of opportunities to make the veins in his neck stick out, which is always a visual prompt to help the audience understand that he is doing good acting.
Plus, I really think I was right with that quest thing. The movie is called 65. Not 75. Not 103. It is named after the year when the dinosaurs were wiped from the face of the planet. Call me a crazy dreamer, but I am now convinced that 65 will be a Tarantino-style piece of revisionist history, where Adam Driver murders thousands of dinosaurs to the point of extinction.
You’d go and see that, wouldn’t you? I would, multiple times. And this is why, while on paper it has “Moonfall-level flop” written all over it, we must all find it within ourselves to make 65 the hit it deserves to be.
